If you care about personal privacy and security of your friends and family, you should discourage them from using Android.
Privacy from who? Security from what? What's the perceived threat we're trying to protect against?
Everything is a tradeoff. To absolutely protect your privacy, you must never be seen in public or interact with any other party in any way.
The original assertion was "If you care about privacy, don't use Android". A more nuanced and useful assertion would be this: If you don't trust a specific private company with your information, don't volunteer it to them. If you don't trust Apple/Google/Microsoft with all of your data, don't buy a device with a radio they have root access on and store all your data on it and carry it with you everywhere you go. This isn't Android-specific.
Imagine if it came out that a company had hired private investigators to follow you around, and collected a list of every location you visited. You tell someone else, and they say "if you really cared about privacy, you should not have come out in public, for instance I met you, and now I know your name, and that you visit this place". It is just nowhere near equivalent.
Someone else commented that this has already been the case for ... at least a decade, for basically everyone (in the U.S.) – the cell phone carriers are those private companies. And there is substantial evidence that they're even less trustworthy than Google.
I hope you realize how flawed that line of logic is.
I actually have location history in google maps turned on deliberately. You can't imagine how often it helped me to know where I was exactly, one and a half year ago, at a precise time. (That's how I managed to get a copy of my nexus 5x's warranty papers after it died on me)
I don't really care about them collecting info about where I go, because it's actually useful for me. I probably would care if they were a small company with no record, but I do know that the worst Google can do is to target ads based on where I am.
I deeply hate ads, I prefer to pay, and I actually often pay the "no-ads" premium if it's available, but if I do get ads, I prefer them to be as personalized as they can possibly be, because this way they are at least mildly useful sometimes.
What's dangerous about them compiling your medical history? Who are you afraid of? Oh wait, that's a HIPAA violation.
I wonder if they keep track of the location of every doctor's office you visit... and that abortion clinic... and that methadone clinic. Surely, nothing to lose there.
The only information that isn't hackable, is information that's never gathered in the first place. The more valuable the information, the more likely someone will spend nation-state amounts of dollars to get it.
I propose Donald Trump use the NSA (legally) to steal all of this information to track illegal immigrants who pass between Mexico and the USA border who don't have a passport on file. And then send SWAT officers to break into everyone's current location, throw them into vans, and send them back over to Mexico.
Wow, that's really fucked up, huh? And Google made it possible.
As for the second one: yes, if I'd be doing something inherently illegal, having a phone with Google on it could be kind of dangerous to me. As I'm not doing anything like that, I have no reason not to use it.
Yes, with technology comes digitalization of information, and people can hack any of the places my information is, wherein Google is one of the most secure comparatively.
You could argue that digitalization is bad, but before that, you could just find info on patients in the dumpster of the clinic.
So those doing nothing wrong have nothing to fear? Isn't that a far-right argument?
What about states where marijuana is legal but the ATF/feds still break down your house because it's not legal on a federal level? What if Trump decides to go after anyone he thinks is a "drug dealer"? He surely didn't focus his acts when he made the Muslim ban instead of a terrorist ban.
And what about when the government started tracking and wire-tapping journalists under the last presidency?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Department_of_Justice_inv...
We like to pretend our country is "the good guys" but we track and suppress journalists and dissenters (and break and ban encryption) just like any other country and we should NOT be giving companies that ASSIST and ENABLE that draconian act any moral slack. This isn't a movie, this is real life and it's going on right now. People's lives are affected by data.
What happens when some neo-con makes an app that correlates people's user ID's and finds anyone who went to a gay club, and outs them. Uber, for example, has all the required information. And now we know that Google does too.
And the only protection we have is the "hope" or "trust" that Google is 1) unhackable, 2) unpersuadable by governments or financial interests and 3) infallible in implementation with no exploits.
I keep saying it and I'll say it again: "The only unhackable data, is data that's never collected in the first place." The more valuable the data, the more incentive there is to get it through legal or illegal means. And nation-states are definitely watching and exploiting useful data. We see it in massive breaches every month.
> Wow, that's really fucked up, huh?
Well, fucked up that you're picking specifically on the Mexicans, sure (it's not right to ratchet up enforcement on just one nationality or race). And more than a little heavy-handed on enforcement.
Other than the obvious hyperbole, it's enforcing the law. Selective enforcement and non-enforcement of laws that you disagree with isn't a good thing; it allows those laws to stay on the books past their usefulness.
I picked Mexican deportation because it's an issue WE all disagree with. It's using common ground to make an argument. You might as well be calling anyone who says "hitler was evil" a neo-Nazi. I'm arguing AGAINST giving Trump tools for deportation.
Get off your moral high horse so you can realize we're all on the same plane.
I understand that. I picked that section of your argument to attack because I'm against targeting specific races or nationalities, but I'm not against enforcing our current laws against criminals. We should absolutely enforce our immigration laws. Just like we should enforce our laws governing medical privacy and such.
I disagree with "Mexican deportation" because it's targeting the wrong thing. Anyone subject to deportation should be deported, not just some specific race or nationality. If that's not what the country wants anymore, cool, that'll generate the support to overhaul the laws. Loosen residency and citizenship requirements. Get it so those people don't have to hide in the shadows.
This "sanctuary city/state" crap is just prolonging the pain. It's a net negative for the states and the country as a whole.
As a whole, I'm against giving the government more information than it already has. But your argument made assumptions that don't hold, through much of the country. It was like reading "Civil forfeiture is unjust and should be outlawed. We should be allowed to transport our life savings in cash cross-country. And also the money from that chop shop we run in our spare time."
The problem is, there is no checkbox and data is forever. If one tries to think a little bit they can find some nasty possibilities of how that data could be abused to harm them, either out of malice or completely by accident (hope your name isn't "Archibald Buttle").
With enough data, everyone is guilty of something and today's teens will feed the Google machine for most of their lives if something doesn't change.
But just to be fair - you should have the freedom to upload all your data to whoever you want. Masochism is odd, but not particularly objectionable.
- Worried about Google? Android is bad. Google collects your data.
- Worried about the government? Since Google must obey warrants for your data, Android is bad.
- Worried about malicious third parties? Since Google has failed to patch even the Pixel line for KRACK until the December update... yeah, Android is bad. And malware through the Play Store that hits large numbers of devices is quite common.
To be clear: I greatly dislike iPhones. But Apple controls their store with a quality approval methodology, they patch all of the devices on their platform promptly going back a number of years, their business model is not built around data mining, and their privacy features have frustrated and irritated the government.
I dislike the iPhone, but if you want privacy and security, you should get an iPhone.
> I dislike the iPhone, but if you want privacy and security, you should get an iPhone.
If you want privacy and security, don't buy a smartphone.
WPA2 working correctly does not guarantee that you are secure, but WPA2 working correctly means it is much harder for someone to do something malicious. The fanboy crowd has leaned heavily on Google's push to get sites to use HTTPS everywhere as a reason to suggest KRACK isn't a big deal, but the reality is a massive amount of Internet traffic still isn't HTTPS, and more than likely, never will be.
The marketing parasite. I know in the US it has taken over the host so I guess its up to Brussels.
You should discourage them from carrying a portable radio transceiver, ie a cell phone, with them at all times. You only know about this because you read it in the news - Android is not the only outfit doing this. Sending tower-data back home is a fundamental part of your cell phone's operation. Without that information, your carrier would have no idea which tower to route incoming data/calls to.
Yes, your carrier already has this information, and should be considered depending on the threat model you're concerned about.
However, NO, this does not mean that other unrelated parties have any business with the data!
The attack surface goes up exponentially with every additional data holder.
Haven't gotten around to it yet, but I'll try and replicate the benefits of Privacy Guard using one of the privacy tools in the Xposed framework (via Magisk framework).
You can have a FLOSS Browser (Firefox) and eMail (K9), that takes care of almost all use cases for smartphone usage.
It's fine that your use cases are extremely limited, but not everyone is you.